Public Policy News

The Internal and External Validity of the Regression Discontinuity Design: A Meta-Analysis of 15 Within-Study-Comparisons | JPAM Featured Article

Regression discontinuity (RD) is generally acknowledged as the most rigorous non-experimental method for obtaining internally valid impact estimates. The study tests the efficacy of RD by comparing RD causal estimates at the treatment cutoff to those from Randomized Control Trials also estimated at this same cutoff. The study identifies 15 previously completed within-study-comparisons that explicitly examined this issue by assuming the RCT results are unbiased and comparing them to RD results.

Public Policy News

The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) will move to it’s new home at the American University School of Public Affairs in July 2018. Erdal Tekin will assume the role of Editor-in-Chief. “Professor Tekin has excellent credentials for serving as JPAM’s Editor-in-Chief,” wrote the JPAM Selection Committee. “He is a first-rate academic with a long record of scholarly contributions in the areas of health and demographic economics.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Evidence-Based Policymaking Initiative is designed to continue and expand the work of the U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, which outlined a vision that rigorous evidence can be created efficiently as a routine part of government operations. In turn, this evidence can be used to construct effective policy.

The APPAM Fall Conference has long been the place to learn what’s going on in the world of evidence-based research. With the publication of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking Report last month, we wanted to highlight the conference sessions that will touch on issues raised by this important report.

APPAM has selected Susan Dynarski, University of Michigan, John M. Yinger, Syracuse University, and Mallory Flowers, Georgia Institute of Technology, as the recipients of three prestigious public policy awards.
Recipients will accept the Spencer Foundation Award, the Steven D. Gold Award and the PhD Dissertation Award on Friday, November 3, at the 2107 APPAM Fall Research Conference in Chicago.

APPAM is soliciting its members for nominations to the APPAM Policy Council and for the positions of President-Elect, Vice-President, and Secretary. All terms will begin in 2018. President-Elect, Vice President, and Secretary are 2-year terms; all Policy Council (Board) positions are 4-year terms. Policy Council members and those elected for officer positions help determine the strategic direction of APPAM and are involved in shaping the focus of the programs that benefit all members.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke’s Policy Bridge, and the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management (APPAM) hosted an Institutional Member forum on February 17, 2017 which explored how research being conducted in universities is informing policy. Discussion included the role of practitioners in making policy, researcher/policymaker partnerships, and some strategies to bridge the gap between policy and practice.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy and APPAM hosted an Institutional Member forum on February 17, 2017 which explored how research being conducted in universities is informing policy. Discussion included the role of practitioners in making policy, researcher/policymaker partnerships, and some strategies to bridge the gap between policy research and practice.

MDRC’s Center for Applied Behavioral Science (CABS) and APPAM hosted a forum on December 13, 2016 which explored the future of behavioral science research, practice, and policy. The event, held in DC, brought together distinguished experts from MDRC, academia, and the government to share their work and provide insight on next steps for research, practice, and policy.

APPAM will host two regional student conferences in 2017. The DC Regional Student Conference will be held on April 7th - 8th, 2016 at George Mason University in Arlington, VA. The California Regional Student Conference will be held on April 9th - 10th at the University of California Riverside in Riverside, CA. During these conferences, students will present research across a wide variety of policy areas, through poster sessions and on conference panels with their peers.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As young people flock to cities, more and more notice the burden of high rent. Why is rent so high, and how do we know when it's a problem? Spence breaks down rental markets with urban economist Dr. Sam Staley: how do we measure changes in the housing market, how do we decide between good and bad development, and who are the YIMBY unicorns?

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) is pleased to announce that the winner of this year’s Raymond Vernon Memorial Award is Kerri Raissian of the University of Connecticut Department of Public Policy for her paper "Hold Your Fire: Did the 1996 Federal Gun Control Act Expansion Reduce Domestic Homicides?" The paper was first published in the Winter 2016 issue of JPAM.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

The Association of Public Policy and Management (APPAM) is pleased to announce that the 2016 Ph.D. Dissertation Award Winner is Dr. Vincent Reina, of the University of Southern California, Sol Price School of Public Policy. Honorable mentions have been bestowed to Eric Roberts, of John Hopkins University, and Daniel Sebastian Tello-Trillo, of Vanderbilt University.

The Association of Public Policy and Management (APPAM) is pleased to announce that the 2016 David N. Kershaw Award Winner is Dr. Varun Rai of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Rai will give a featured presentation during the 2016 Fall Research Conference on Friday, November 4.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

The Exemplar Award was created by APPAM's Policy Council in 2013 to draw attention to the important role individuals play in connecting research and policy in the policymaking process. The award recognizes the work of an individual who has made major contributions to public policy by valuing the knowledge resident in academia and using research and analysis to craft innovative solutions to policy problems.

The Association of Public Policy and Management (APPAM) is pleased to announce that it has recently granted 25 students with the Equity and Inclusion Fellowship. The grant allows recipients to attend the association’s annual Fall Research Conference.

The Association of Public Policy and Management (APPAM) and the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy are pleased to announce that Rudolph Penner, Ph.D., Robert Reischauer, Ph.D., and Alice Rivlin, Ph.D. have been jointly selected as the 2016 winner(s) of the Peter H. Rossi Award.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) invites the submission of manuscripts to be published either individually or in a series of symposiums in forthcoming issues on the “Evaluation of the Affordable Care Act” depending on the volume of submissions.

The Division of Politics and Economics in Claremont Graduate University’s (CGU) School of Social Science, Policy, and Evaluation offers a 16-month Master of Arts in Public Policy (MAPP) and a PhD-level field in Public Policy as part of the Political Science doctoral program. The division also offers joint degree programs with the Division of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences (MA Public Policy and Evaluation) and The Drucker Ito School of Business (MA Politics, Economics and Business).

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

In an effort to encourage participation by underrepresented students in APPAM and its activities, the Policy Council and APPAM’s Diversity Committee created the ‘APPAM Equity and Inclusion Fellowship’ in April 2016.
The fellowship will support the travel and participation of up to 25 students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds at the 2016 APPAM Fall Research Conference, November 3 -5, in Washington, DC.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

Are you an emerging policy professional eager to influence policy with your research? Please join APPAM and AcademyHealth as we take a deep dive into what policy students and practitioners can do to become an influential policy advisor and go-to person on emerging issues.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

The Pepperdine School of Public Policy offers a two-year, full-time Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree, as well as joint degree programs with the Graziadio School of Business and Management (MPP/MBA), and with the Pepperdine School of Law (MPP/JD) and its Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution (MPP/MDR).​

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

As part of our ongoing effort to promote JPAM authors to the APPAM membership and the public policy world at large, we are asking JPAM authors to answer a few questions to promote their research article on the APPAM website.

We are both researchers with a deep interest in the effects, both intended and unintended, of policy interventions, particularly those relating to issues of criminal justice. Having been personally exposed to GDL through family and friends, the hypothesized effects of the policy on crime seemed natural and important to us.

The McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific, Sacramento campus, offers three distinctive professional degrees, which join knowledge of the law, competencies in analyses, and skills in action. The Public Policy and Administration degrees emphasize deep engagement of students with consequential public policy issues, consistent with the commitment to experiential learning that is the hallmark of the University.

Accumulated evidence from dozens of cash transfer programs across the world suggest that there are few interventions that can match the range of impacts and cost-effectiveness of a small, predictable monetary transfer to poor families in developing countries. However, individual published impact assessments typically focus on only one program and one outcome. This article presents two-year impacts of the Zambian Government’s Child Grant.

The mission of the Bloustein School and the Program in Public Policy “pursues equitable and efficient solutions to public problems at multiple levels from the global to the local.” The complexity of the questions facing today’s policymakers has grown immeasurably; at the Bloustein School, we are committed to giving our students the knowledge to deal with these questions, preparing them to become agents of positive change.

If you are unable to attend APPAM's 2015 Fall Research Conference in Miami, November 12-14 and wish to experience some of the conference, APPAM has the solution. During the Fall Research Conference, APPAM will be live streaming three, ninety-minute symposia focused on evidence-based policy.

APPAM, in conjunction with the International Comparative Policy Analysis (ICPA) Forum, are pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Award for Best Comparative Paper. Dr. Laura Langbein and Dr. Pablo Sanabria were selected for their paper "Independent Professional Bureaucracies and Street-Level Corruption: Evidence From Latin America," originally presented at APPAM’s 2014 Fall Research Conference in Albuquerque, NM.

The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) is pleased to announce that the winners of this year’s Raymond Vernon Memorial Award are Thomas S. Dee and James H. Wyckoff for their paper Incentives, Selection and Teacher Performance: Evidence from IMPACT.

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) is pleased to announce Manasi Deshpande, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as the winner of the 2015 Best Dissertation Award. Honorable mention goes to Alexander Smith, University of Virginia and Gabriel Cardona-Fox, University of Texas, Austin.

There are many ways in which public policy affects health outcomes. One such policy, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), has impacted how the country’s health care system serves millions of Americans. The focus has now shifted to how policies like the ACA affect health care services and other social determinants of health.

The Association of Public Policy and Analysis Management (APPAM) has selected Sean Reardon, Stanford University, as the recipient of the 2015 Spencer Foundation Award. The Spencer Foundation Award recognizes noteworthy contributions through research and analysis in the field of education policy and management.​

APPAM is pleased to announce that Rebecca Blank, Chancellor, University of Wisconsin-Madison and former APPAM President (2006-2007), is the recipient of this year’s APPAM Exemplar Award. The Exemplar Award recognizes the work of an individual who has made major contributions to public policy by valuing the knowledge resident in academia and using research and analysis to craft innovative solutions to policy problems.

The mission of the School of Public Affairs is to enhance the performance of governmental and nonprofit institutions in New York and the nation in the interest of effective and equitable public service and public policy in a diverse society.

The Urban Institute marked the 50th anniversary of the establishment of HUD by hosting a panel discussion, Opportunity in Urban American. HUD Secretary Julián Castro joined city leaders, and urban experts reflecting on the shared history of HUD and the Urban Institute, discussing the current state of opportunity in American cities, and looking ahead to the challenges facing urban communities in the next 50 years.

On May 14, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) introduced The Student Privacy Protection Act (SB 1341). This legislation, if it were to pass, would have a devastating impact on the quality of education research.

PublicServiceCareers.org is the most widely used website for finding jobs, career advice, and information on degrees in public service and public affairs. It is sponsored by the three most prominent organizations in professional public service and education: Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management, Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and the American Society for Public Administration.​

In this article authors George Wehby, Benjamin W. Domingue and Jason D. Boardman evaluate the hypothesis that genetic factors influence the use of health services and prevention behaviors in a national sample of adult twins in the United States.

The mission of the School of Public Policy is to provide quality education for a diverse range of students, both full and part-time. The School welcomes students who have recently completed their undergraduate education or master's degree, and are interested in pursuing careers in policy analysis, management, or research, as well as mid-career professionals who want to improve their abilities and qualifications.​

The Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia develops leaders and generates new knowledge to solve the world’s toughest public policy challenges. Through policy and analysis training in critical leadership skills, the school inspires students to act vigorously, effectively and ethically on behalf of the common good. The School teaches that policy is everywhere, and students can lead from anywhere.

Join Us for Happy Hour!
APPAM Student Happy Hour
Tuesday, March 24th, 2015
5:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m
Tonic Restaurant at Quigley’s Pharmacy
2036 G St. NW
Washington, DC 20036
Closest Metro Station: Foggy Bottom
Come join us for a post spring break happy hour to connect with current
policy members and learn how APPAM membership has benefited them both as
students and after graduation. Policy students of all levels are invited to join APPAM
members and staff for complementary cocktails and

Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the March Current Population Survey, we provide poverty estimates for 1967 to 2012 based on a historical supplemental poverty measure (SPM). During this period, poverty, as officially measured, has stagnated. However, the official poverty measure (OPM) does not account for the effect of near-cash transfers on the financial resources available to families.​

This year, the House Agriculture Committee will hold hearings on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). SNAP (formerly Food Stamps) was expanded in 2009 in response to the economic crisis, and the number of recipients and spending on the program grew rapidly during the Great Recession. Last year modest cuts were made to SNAP, but current congressional efforts to overhaul the program might translate into much larger program reductions.

There is widespread belief among people who follow education issues in Washington DC that there could be a provision in upcoming legislation that would have an impact on researchers who use data from local and state school systems.

If you're a current APPAM member and you have not yet voted, be sure to do so today. You should have received a reminder ballot last week. If you have not, please email Tara Sheehan, tsheehan@appam.org.

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) is happy to announce the Association’s new leadership team for 2015. Jane Waldfogel, Columbia University, officially steps into her role as APPAM’s President, replacing Angela Evans, University of Texas at Austin, who moves into the role of Immediate Past President. Ron Haskins, Brookings University, joins the Executive Committee as President-Elect.

The deaths of African-Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Cleveland and on Staten Island have reignited a debate about race. Some argue that these events are isolated and that racism is a thing of the past. Others contend that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, highlighting that skin color still has a huge effect on how people are treated.

In the turbulent culture wars over sex, love, poverty and the future of the American family, Isabel V. Sawhill, the winner of APPAM's 2014 Exemplar Award and a blunt, influential and formidable voice, has long come down squarely on the side of marriage.

The students, faculty, and alumni of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University (GSU) work to advance economic opportunity, human rights and social justice by helping to improve public policy and management around the globe.

The Master’s of Public Policy and Administration Program at Sacramento State is an interdisciplinary program designed to equip its graduates with the conceptual, analytic, and problem-solving skills and experiences necessary for them to deal effectively with public sector policy and administrative issues, problems, and opportunities. In the fall of 2014, Sac State celebrated its 25th year of granting the MPPA, with over 400 alumni working in the Sacramento Area, California, and the world.

Students worry about job prospects as tenure-track jobs dwindle, and often want universities to do more to prepare students for careers outside academe. They also want universities to better track Ph.D.-placement data, which more institutions in recent years are trying to do.

Over the last 15 years, juvenile justice advocates fought hard to convince policymakers and government officials that the best way to help youth succeed and improve public safety is to keep them out of secure confinement. To keep youth out of confinement, we argued, we should place youth in the community and enroll them in evidence-based practices (EBPs) close to home.

As a Master’s student, I was very happy to see the new Data Analytics Track at the APPAM Fall Research Conference this year. In my program at the Bloustein School for Planning and Public Policy, students have the option to concentrate their studies in a number of different areas. One of the least favorite for many of the students is the Methods track, the track that focus strongly on quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Hard to believe the 2014 Fall Research Conference is now ten days behind us! This was APPAM's largest conference yet, featuring nearly 300 sessions and events, and saw more than 1,500 attendees in Albuqueque, New Mexico. The APPAM staff thanks everyone who attended; you made this year quite exciting!
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As many of us are approaching our fateful graduation day in the spring, we are currently investigating organizations that will align with our passions to make the world a better place. Yet, there is one burning question that had been reiterated at APPAM’s Professional Development Workshop, one that may pose challenging to answer: What is the difference between MDRC and Mathematica?

Unionized child-care providers are more likely to seek state-regulated licenses, a proxy for program quality, according to a study presented last week at the Association for Public Policy and Management conference in New Mexico.

This 2014 Fall Research Conference session presented several papers that looked at father involvement and co-parenting of children from birth to childhood and its effects on both maternal and child outcomes.​

Health and employment often go hand-in-hand with a person’s health status, contributing to their ability to work and employment potentially impacting health both in positive and potentially negative way. With such a simultaneous relationship between health and employment, policies in both realms are bound to influence the other variable.

In light of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the first questions posed was “Have we seen improvements in racial segregation in housing policy over the last 50 years?” and one of the final questions posed was, “Why should we care?”

The Johns Hopkins Master of Public Policy (MPP) was created in 1992 as the Masters of Arts in Policy Studies (MAPS) under the direction of Dr. Lester Salamon in an effort to address a clear demand for qualitatively oriented analysis of social policy. The program was found to be of high-quality and to have succeeded remarkably well in its short existence.

This session revolved around the issues of institutional, political, and cultural changes and their impact on public management and fiscal policy at the state and local level. The three papers in this session make important contributions to the literature in terms of transparency, ethical, and decision making issues. The discussant, Doug Goodman, stated that the papers also bring to mind several questions that should be addressed by further research.

This panel discussed supplemental poverty measure (SPM) and the official poverty measure (OPM) across four major national datasets. Examining how these measures worked and didn’t work helps researchers and policy makers understand how government programs supported different populations.

To kick off the 2014 APPAM Fall Research Conference, the former U.S. Senator from New Mexico Jeff Bingaman spoke at the APPAM/NASPAA Joint Plenary. The Senator spoke on how we can work to make government function better.

Dr. Larry Orr was selected as this year’s 2014 Peter H. Rossi Award winner. Orr began his discussion by highlighting the important times and influential people in his life and career. He mentioned how he got his start as Assistant Professor at Wisconsin, Madison and discussed working with Joseph Newhouse on the RAND project.

The panel on Nonprofit Dynamics in Diverse Policy Environments: International and Domestic Perspectives was marked by interesting rationalization about the effects of various nonprofit strategies that were tested using remarkable datasets. Two papers were based on custom built data sets on U.S. nonprofits that were created using public filings, administrative data, and surveys. The two other papers had data on nonprofits from structurally different countries: Lebanon and Cambodia.

The Thursday panel on nonprofit financial management raised a set of interesting questions with regards to nonprofits through the lens of random shock, unrestricted net assets, and public charities' pension plans.

With over half of all births—many unplanned—to young adults in the United States today occurring outside of marriage, the result is an increase in poverty and inequality for children. One side of the political aisle argues for more social support for unmarried parents, while the other side argues for a return to traditional marriage.

Earlier this month, APPAM announced Dr. Larry L. Orr of Johns Hopkins University as the latest recipient of the Peter H. Rossi Award. For the last 40 years, Orr has made numerous notable contributions to the field of evaluation. He is also known for helping other researchers conceptualize and conduct their own high quality work.

Head Start is the oldest and largest federally-funded preschool program in the United States, currently serving more than one million children with almost $8 billion dollars appropriated annually. From its inception, Head Start not only provided early childhood education, care, and services for children, but also sought to promote parents’ engagement in their children’s schooling, their childrearing skills, and their own educational progress.

Last month Donald Moynihan, professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, was announced as this year’s recipient of the David N. Kershaw Award. Given every two years, the award is presented to a scholar under the age of 40 who has made a distinguished contribution to public policy analysis and management. Moynihan took some time to discuss his work, the award, and people who have had an influence on his life.

APPAM, in conjunction with the International Comparative Policy Analysis (ICPA) Forum, are pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Award for Best Comparative Paper. Sanya Carley, Jennifer Brass, Elizabeth Baldwin, and Lauren M. MacLean were selected for their paper "Global Expansion of Renewable Energy Generation: An Analysis of Policy Instruments," originally presented at APPAM’s 2013 Fall Research Conference in Washington, DC.

Recently, Mathematica Policy Research hosted a forum that examined the emerging field of implementation science. There is growing recognition across disciplines of the importance of implementation research to guide the adoption, replication, and scale-up of evidence-based programs.

This past July, APPAM President Angela Evans was honored by Representative James P. Moran (D-VA) in the Congressional Record. During the second session of the 113th Congress, Congressman Moran rose and made several statements honoring Evans' career and achievements. "This remarkable woman merits our recognition and gratitude for her dedication and commitment to public service, serving more than 35 years at the Congressional Research Service."

APPAM, in conjunction with the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) and the National Tax Association (NTA) are pleased to announce that Professor Ronald C. Fisher, Michigan State University, is the recipient of this year’s Steven D. Gold Award.

APPAM is pleased to announce that Isabel Sawhill, Co-Director of the Center on Children and Families and the Budgeting for National Priorities Project at the Brookings Institution, is the recipient of this year’s APPAM Exemplar Award. The Exemplar Award recognizes the work of an individual who has made major contributions to public policy by valuing the knowledge resident in academia and using research and analysis to craft innovative solutions to policy problems.

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified when and how it is legally permissible for universities to use an applicant’s race or ethnicity in its admissions decisions. The court concluded in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin that such use is permitted when “no workable race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity.”

Reducing motor vehicle accidents is a perennial concern for health policy makers. Motor vehicle accidents cause more than 40,000 deaths and several million injuries each year, and are also the leading cause of death among children in the United States. While a large body of literature examines the impact of regulations and technological innovations, such as seat belts, airbags, and child safety seats, there has been considerably less work on the effect of traffic law enforcement.

There's no argument that networking today is critical for success. At its core, networking is making contacts and encouraging an information exchange that fosters voluntary collaboration. While dissemination of information is part of the networking process, it isn't the final definition. In order to be truly successful, there needs to be some dialogue, reciprocity, and mutual interaction.

While the distinctions between organizational sectors have never been particularly clear, the emergence of new corporate forms that intentionally blend for-profit organizational forms with public purposes blur the lines further. More than 600 organizations nationwide are now certified as “B-Corporations”, legally integrating public purposes, accountability and transparency into their founding documents and stated corporate missions.

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) is pleased to announce Anjali Adukia, an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, as the winner of the 2014 Best Dissertation Award. Honorable mention goes to Sara Heller, Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Criminology.

For the last two weeks, a debate on raising the minimum wage has been waged here between the author team of Jared Bernstein, Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former Chief Economist to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Heidi Shierholz, Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, and Joseph J. Sabia, Associate Professor of Economics at San Diego State University.

There’s been a long-held understanding among economists that the United States tax system can have important effects on economic growth. Such a connection has loomed rather large during the recent downturn of the last few years. There remains considerable debate about how the current income tax system affects the economy, how large those effects are, and what the potential is for politically feasible tax reforms to boost the national economy.

As Congress returns to its duties this fall, one of the current debates they'll continue to address is that of raising the minimum wage. The debate was sparked anew by a February 2014 Congressional Budget Office report, The Effects of a Minimum-Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income. From this came two important questions: Would minimum wage legislation diminsh poverty? Are there other efficient alternatives to such legislation?

Authors Emily Gray Collins and Brad Hershbein use a unique natural experiment to investigate the sensitivity of American college women's contraceptive choice and sexual behavior to the price of prescription birth control. With the passage of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, Congress inadvertently and unexpectedly increased the effective price of birth control pills (“the Pill”) at college health centers more than three-fold, from $5 to $10 a month to between $30 to $50 a month.

As anyone who has done a local site visit or studied street-level bureaucracy knows, there is a lot of interesting variation in the delivery of policy or programs at the local level. Local idiosyncrasies of political conflict or will, economic conditions, and bureaucratic or nonprofit capacity matter to the outcomes we observe across places, programs, and populations. To some extent, “all policy is local.”

In the Fall 2014 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the current “hot button” topic of minimum wage is debated. Given the current controversy of the consequences of a minimum wage increase, as lately outlined in the February 2014 Congressional Budget Office report "The Effects of a Minimum-Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income," two questions must be asked: Would minimum wage legislation diminish poverty? Are there efficient alternatives to this legislation?

Growth in spending per beneficiary in the fee-for-service portion of Medicare has slowed substantially in recent years. The slowdown has been widespread, extending across all of the major service categories, groups of beneficiaries that receive very different amounts of medical care, and all major regions.​

Evaluations of public programs in many fields reveal that different types of programs—or different versions of the same program—vary in their effectiveness. Moreover, a program that is effective for one group of people might not be effective for other groups, and a program that is effective in one set of circumstances may not be effective in other circumstances.

Medicaid provides health insurance for more than 54 million Americans. In this paper, featured at last year's Fall Research Conference, authors Benjamin D. Sommers and Donald Oellerich use the Census Bureau's supplemental poverty measure to estimate the impact of eliminating the program. They found that Medicaid kept between 2.6 and 3.4 million people out of poverty in 2010, making it the country's third-largest antipoverty program.

The theory of action upon which high-stakes accountability policies are based calls for systemic reforms in educational systems that will emerge by pairing incentives for improvement with extensive and targeted technical assistance (TA) to build the capacity of low-performing schools and districts. ​

The dominant public discourse around the recent mortgage and foreclosure crisis has primarily focused on recent housing market dynamics such as subprime lending and declining housing values. In this paper from the APPAM Online Paper Collection, authors Danya Keene, Julia Lynch, and Amy Baker present an alternative narrative about mortgage default and foreclosure that emerged from 28 in-depth interviews with working-class, African American homeowners who were at risk of losing their homes.

As an intrinsic part of the classic microfinance model, group meetings are intended to employ social capital to ensure timely repayment. Recent research suggests that more frequent meetings can increase social capital among first-time clients.

Mathematica's experts will present on a variety of topics in welfare, labor, and research methods at this year's National Association for Welfare Research and Statistics to be held August 17 to 20 in Providence, Rhode Island, including APPAM Secretary Matt Stagner.

Till von Wachter, Jae Song, and Joyce Manchester present new estimates of how job displacement affects the age of claiming Social Security benefits for workers displaced close to retirement age and workers displaced in prime working age.

There are 40 million adults who do not have a high school diploma; 60,000 of them reside in the District of Columbia. The District has pioneered the concept of adult charter schools, centers of education that strive to provide adults with the assistance they need to pass the General Education Development test (GED). Outside of the District’s 11 schools, two in Minneapolis, Minnesota and one in Austin, Texas are under consideration. No other programs like these exist in the country.

The growing emphasis on “evidence based policy” (EBP) is a challenge for the existing evidence base. Most evidence formally applies to a particular program, in a particular place, at a particular time. EBP uses that very specific impact evaluation evidence to inform choices about some other program, in some other place, at some other time.

Performance-based contracting (PBC) is an increasingly attractive practice to public human service agencies. By attaching contract compensation to a contractor's performance achievement, PBC encourages quality services, better outcomes, and less monitoring.

Authors Mark G. Stewart and John Mueller estimates risk reductions for each layer of security designed to prevent commercial passenger airliners from being commandeered by terrorists, kept under control for some time, and then crashed into specific targets. Probabilistic methods are used to characterize the uncertainty of rates of deterrence, detection, and disruption, as well as losses.

Last Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) unveiled his new antipoverty proposal that reforms public assistance programs for low-income Americans. This plan encourages state and local policy innovation and encourages rigorous program evaluations.

Historically, there have been persistent differences between the high school completion rates and standardized test scores of white and black students. These differences narrowed between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s as the educational outcomes of black students improved dramatically. Then, for reasons that previous researchers have been unable to explain, this progress stopped.

Most evaluations are still quasi-experimental and most recent quasi-experimental methodological research has focused on various types of propensity score matching to minimize conventional selection bias on observables. Although these methods create better-matched treatment and comparison groups on observables, the issue of selection on unobservables still looms large.

“The debate is over about the R-word; it’s now about whether if it’s proper to have a football team in this country carry on using a defined slur.” That was the closing statement by Jacqueline Pata, the Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). Her comment capped off a forum at the Center for American Progress, "Missing the Point: The Real Impact of Native Mascots and Team Names on American Indian and Alaska Native Youth."

Since 2004, student loan debt has tripled to $1.1 trillion, surpassing both outstanding auto and credit card debt. Many have sought to connect the dots between the rise in student debt and the five percent decline in homeownership, but research presented this week at the Urban Institute raises questions about the evidence.

Authors Katharine Edin, Laura Tach, and Sarah Halpern-Meeking build on the robust quantitative literature on behavioral responses to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) by using in-depth qualitative interviews with 115 EITC recipients to examine how they understand and respond to its incentive structures regarding earnings, marriage, and childbearing. They found that respondents cannot predict how their EITC refund would change if they altered their labor supply or marital status.

Authors Katharine G. Abraham, University of Maryland, and Susan N. Houseman, Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, present new evidence indicating that jobs saved during the recession as a consequence of short-time compensation program could have been significant in manufacturing, but that the overall scale of the STC was generally too small to have substantially mitigated aggregate job losses in the 17 states.

Michael Hurwitz, Jonathan Smith, and Jessica S. Howell use a rich data set of all SAT takers from 2004 - 2008 to investigate the impact of state-specific school laws on students' pathways into and through college. The authors found that relatively younger students are more likely to attend two-year colleges before attending a four-year institution, among other discoveries in this Early View article from an upcoming issue of JPAM.

A few weeks ago, we presented both sides of a discussion of the Affordable Care Act, where premiums can be adjusted to create incentives for individuals to engage in healthier behaviors including weight loss. Professor John Cawley followed up last week with his counterpoint to Morgan Downey's position paper. In this final counterpoint, Downey, Editor and Publisher of the Downey Obesity Report, presents his counter to Cawley's initial positional paper.

Style and format of research papers vary from subject to subject and journal to journal. While how you write your paper depends on the publication and reader you are addressing, the basic structure of the paper remains constant no matter the subject or discipline. The next critical step is a properly crafted Introduction. Many readers and editors don’t get past this section, so it’s where your best written work needs to be presented.

In this paper by by Lawrence M. Berger, Sarah A. Font, and Kristen S. Slack, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Jane Waldfogel, Columbia University, the authors take advantage of differences between states and over time in the generosity of the total state and federal Earned Income Tax Credit to identify exogenous variation in family income.

Last week, we presented both sides of a discussion of the Affordable Care Act, where premiums can be adjusted to create incentives for individuals to engage in healthier behaviors including weight loss. This week, we present Professor John Cawley's counterpoint to Morgan Downey's paper, "The Doctor Is in Charge: How the ACA Puts the Employee's Physician in Charge of the Wellness Program." Next week will feature Downey's rebuttal to Cawley's initial paper.

There are at least three reasons why fiscal sustainability matters in this context. First, the notion of local governments entering bankruptcy proceeds is no longer a theoretical notion. Second, previous formal sustainability analysis has primarily focused on the aggregate primary balance and debt, with little disaggregation. Finally, there is a need to examine if city and county governments are fiscally sustainable if there is no intergovernmental aid from the state or federal governments.

In the design of public policies, a basic issue often arises regarding the role of incentives versus other barriers in shaping behavior. Under the Affordable Care Act, premiums can be adjusted to create incentives for individuals to engage in healthier behaviors including weight loss. How the incentives may be designed under the Affordable Care Act, their appropriateness, and the likely impact is the focus of this Point/Counterpoint.

In this paper, first presented at the 2013 Fall Research Conference in Washington, DC, University of Arizona authors Eric Schoon, Alexandra Joosse, and H. Brinton Milward address two critical problems in the study of legitimacy by developing a framework for evaluating variations in the effects of legitimation as the product of different configurations of sources, forms, and bases for the legitimation of actors involved in conflict.

This week, APPAM goes back 33 years to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. This article by Christopher K. Leman and Robert H. Nelson examines the use of economics in government as illustrated by the experience of the natural resources agencies and presents ten guiding rules for the practicing policy economist.

The tension between theory and practice is nothing new for the field of public policy. Resolving the pull between theory and practice has been central in the development of the field of public policy and administration. As far back as the late 19th century, Woodrow Wilson, the “father” of American public administration, struggled with this tension as he wrestled with questions regarding how America would govern itself as it grew as a nation.

The Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS) recently held its quarterly meeting in Washington, DC. The theme was the availability and use of administrative data for statistical and research purposes.

After many years of following similar trends, U.S. poverty rates measured by household spending in data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) fell between 2000 and 2008, while poverty measured by income rose.

This week's featured paper from our Online Resource Collection is by Tara Kaul, University of Maryland. This paper uses household survey data to examine the effect of food subsidies on the nutritional outcomes of poor households in India. The national food security program, known as the Public Distribution System (PDS), takes the form of a monthly quota of cereals (rice and/or wheat) available for purchase at substantially discounted prices.

Despite limited empirical evidence, there is growing concern that junk food availability in schools has contributed to the childhood obesity epidemic. In this Spring 2012 JPAM paper, Ashlesha Datar and Nancy Nicosia estimate the effects of junk food availability on body mass index (BMI), obesity, and related outcomes among a national sample of fifth graders.

If you are a professor (which I am) or student (which I was) at a public policy school, you like to tell yourself that your work, in some small way, bridges academia and the world by offering an analytic approach to solving real-world problems. An op-ed by Donald Moynihan, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Amid concern that high levels of consumer debt may be slowing the housing market recovery, many media outlets and financial experts have suggested that rising student loan debt is discouraging home-buying among young adults.

This week, APPAM looks back at Paul Decker's Presidential Address from the 2013 Fall Research Conference. His talk addresses the use of evidence in policymaking and public management—which are sometimes seen as separate. Decker, now Past-President of the Association, views them as strongly connected from the perspective of APPAM, and sees them as critical elements of the path forward for the organization.​

The University of Oregon MPA is based in beautiful Eugene, Oregon. Eugene is a lush, green town at the nexus of the Willamette and McKenzie Rivers. MPA students actually start the program by getting to know each other and the faculty at a two day welcome retreat located in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. (It’s also home to some of the best craft breweries in the U.S.) The intentionally small program embodies Eugene’s sense of community and closeness with the environment.

JPAM Editor Maureen Pirog shares some key principles to keep in mind when pursuing publication of scholarly work. Over the years as editor, she has designed a top 10 list of things that prospective authors should and should not do if they want to publish their work. It is meant to be constructive, and hopefully, it will be useful for some people.

School districts are spending millions on tutoring outside regular school day hours for economically and academically disadvantaged students in need of extra academic assistance. Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), parents of children in persistently low-performing schools were allowed to choose their child's tutoring provider, and together with school districts, they were also primarily responsible for holding providers in the private market accountable for performance.

Presented at the 2013 Fall Research Conference, "Going Beyond Service Delivery" investigates the nature, scope, causes, and implications of citizen participation in government contracting. Authors Anna A. Amirkhanyan, Hyun Joon Kim, and Kristina T. Lambright use 33 in-depth interviews with county government contract monitoring officers, as well as managers of nonprofit and for-profit organizations to focus on government contracts in the field of health and human services.

As school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to understand what family and school factors are associated with the enrollment decisions families make. Families do not choose a charter school because of its racial or ethnic composition, nor do race and ethnicity within a household influence its choice of charter schools.

The annual effects of SNAP on poverty itself were first estimated in the late 1970s and then regularly after the Census Bureau began to record recipients and amounts of food stamps in 1979. In The Effect of SNAP on Poverty by Laura Tiehen, USDA; Dean Jolliffe, World Bank; and Timothy Smeeding, University of Wisconsin, the authors examine SNAP's effectiveness as an antipoverty weapon.

In 2006, Massachusetts passed health care reform legislation designed to achieve nearly universal coverage through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, and subsidies that later served as the model for national reform. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we provide evidence that health care reform in Massachusetts led to better overall self-assessed health. Various robustness checks and placebo tests support a causal interpretation of the results.

The way Americans live and work has changed significantly since the creation of the Social Security Administration in 1935, but U.S. social welfare policy has failed to keep up with these changes. The model of the male breadwinner-led nuclear family has given way to diverse and often complex family structures, more women in the workplace, and nontraditional job arrangements.

While the war against drugs has consumed approximately 40 billion dollars per year in the last four decades, there is very limited evidence on its effectiveness. This paper studies the effects of the biggest anti-drug program ever applied in a drug-producing country.

Longstanding arguments exist for legalization and regulation of the growth and possession of marijuana. States are taking the lead, again serving as engines of innovation on this policy issue. Some states have decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, while others have allowed for the production and use of medical marijuana. Two states, Colorado and Washington, have additionally legalized recreational use.

Philip DeCicca, McMaster University; Donald Kenkel, Cornell University; and Feng Liu, Shanghai University presented their paper "Reservation Prices: An Economic Analysis of Cigarette Purchases on Indian Reservations" at the 2013 Fall Research Conference during the session New Evidence of the Policy Impacts on Health Behaviors. It is this week's featured paper from APPAM's Online Paper Collection.​

The motto of the School of Public Affairs is “Lead. Solve. Change.” It simply and powerfully expresses the vision of providing excellent student programs, valuable research and important service to Colorado and beyond. CU Denver's mission is to train the leaders for Colorado’s future, and to utilize its faculty research and the applied research and leadership programs the Buechner Institute for Governance to help solve problems.

Authors Steven W. Hemelt and Dave E. Marcotte look at a key form of student-level accountability in the requirement for students to pass high school exit exams (HSEEs) in order to receive a diploma. Their paper, "High School Exit Exams and Dropout in an Era of Increased Accountability," published in the Spring 2013 issue of JPAM, examine the impact of HSEEs on dropout during a period when these exams became more common and rigorous.

Random assignment experimentation, once used primarily in medical clinical trials, is now an accepted method among social scientists across a broad range of disciplines. The technique is used to evaluate a variety of programs from microfinance and welfare reform to housing vouchers and teaching methods. So how did randomized experiments move beyond the realm of medicine and into the social sciences? Can these methods be used effectively to evaluate complex social problems and programs?

On Thursday, April 24, APPAM and Abt Associates is hosting a day-long Institutional Member Forum at the University Club in downtown Washington, DC. "Social Experiments in Practice: The Why, When, Where, and How of Experimental Design and Analysis" will explore how recent methodological advances can address real-world realities in the United States and abroad.

With encouragement and assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, many local governments and metropolitan coalitions are mapping opportunity to inform the development of regional sustainable communities plans. In this week's Online Paper Collection featured work, the authors examine the notion that the neighborhood in which a person lives shapes their social and economic opportunities is not new, but how opportunity is to be measured.

In "Family Business or Social Problem? The Cost of Unreported Domestic Violence," authors Scott E. Carrell and Mark Hoekstra find that although children exposed to as-yet-unreported domestic violence reduce the achievement of their classroom peers, these costs disappear completely once the parent reports the violence to the court.

Mathematica has appointed vice president Myles Maxfield to lead its data analytics portfolio. Solutions to challenging public policy problems involve multiple disciplines, experiences, and perspectives, and Maxfield is well versed in health care, employment and training, nutrition, and education data and analysis. He also has been instrumental in guiding the company's health work in program integrity, Medicaid analytics, and reporting analytics for the health insurance exchanges.

This week's featured paper from our Online Paper Collection is by Quentin Karpilow, Brookings Institution; Jennifer Manlove, Child Trends; Isabel Sawhill, Brookings Institution; and Adam Thomas, Georgetown University. "The Role of Contraception in Preventing Abortion, Nonmarital Childbearing, and Child Poverty" was presented at the session Strategies for Preventing Teen Pregnancy at the 2013 Fall Research Conference.

In this week's featured JPAM article, authors Mark Duggan and Tamara Hayford examine whether the shift from fee-for-service into managed care leads to an increase or reduction in Medicaid spending. "Has the Shift to Managed Care Reduced Medicaid Expenditures? Evidence from State and Local-Level Mandates" was published in the Summer 2013 issue of JPAM.

As we are closing in on APPAM’s deadline for abstract submission, take a moment to reflect on what motivates you to go the extra mile in your research. It’s my experience that it usually takes an extra mile, and probably two, to bring that abstract, presentation, or paper to completion. In those moments, when perhaps the last thing you want to do is revisit a particular piece of research, what pushes you to go ahead and try to make it even better?

Tommy Sowers, assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, will join the faculty of Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy this summer. Sowers has received a one-year appointment as a visiting assistant professor of the practice and assistant director of the school’s Hart Leadership Program.

In an effort to reach mid-career and internationally-focused students, the McCourt School of Public Policy will soon offer two new study abroad opportunities and two new executive education opportunities.​

Between 1975 and 2007, the American incarceration rate increased nearly fivefold, a historic increase that puts the United States in a league of its own among advanced economies. The United States incarcerates more people today and stands out as the nation that most frequently uses incarceration to punish those who break the law. What factors explain the dramatic rise in incarceration rates in such a short period of time?

The Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy recently hosted their 2014 Public Issue Forum focused on veteran reintegration at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington Cemetery.

There has been an exodus of expertise from Capitol Hill and its consequences heighten Congressional dysfunction. The principal reason for Congress’ decline in expertise in recent decades is the erosion of the committee system as the powers of party leaders were increased. It began in 1975 with the dismantlement of the seniority system for choosing committee chairmen and their consequent subordination to the Democratic caucus and leadership.

APPAM is sponsoring several conference sessions at next year’s Western Economic Association International’s (WEAI) Pacific Rim Conference. Maureen Pirog, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, is requesting papers from APPAM members and will be organizing the sessions. The four-day conference will be held January 8 – 11, 2015, in Wellington, New Zealand and is hosted by Victoria University of Wellington and Massey University.

APPAM's Spring Conference is a few days away, just as spring makes a hearty debut in the Washington, DC area. The conference is this Saturday, April 12 at the University Club. Featured is a mix of panel sessions and roundtables for students, educators, and practitioners to choose from. Overall, APPAM is offering twelve great sessions over the course of the day; both breakfast and lunch are included with preregistration.

Let’s put our hands together for North Carolina. Among the 36 states that used the federal health care exchange, North Carolina came in third – with more than 200,000 residents enrolling in Obamacare as of last week’s deadline.
Should we now kick off our boots, rest our legs and lean back until open enrollment rolls around again next November? Not quite.

This week's featured paper was originally presented in the session What Can Panel Data Tell Us About Participation in Federal Food Assistance Programs During the Great Recession? during the 2013 Fall Research Conference. This paper, by Alix Gould-Werth and H. Luke Shaefer, uses panel data from the national representative SIPP from years 2000-2011, to examine changes in the prevalence and character of joint participation in SNAP and UI among job losers during the Great Recession.

Featured in the Spring 2013 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Research, Irene Henriques, Bryan Husted, and Ivan Monteil compare the environmental performance of voluntary environmental programs with different attributes.

Signed into law in 1975, the Earned Income Tax Credit was designed to offset regressive payroll taxes, supplement low wages, and reward hard work. The EITC has been strengthened several times by administrations on both sides of the political divide and is now considered one of the federal government’s largest and most effective anti-poverty programs. Currently, the EITC is the subject of many discussions on Capitol Hill.

The abstract for your research paper is often the first contact a reader has with your total work. It needs to draw their attention while stating relevant conclusions, all to draw them into your work so you can share the more relevant details. Writing a good abstract is key to get your paper accepted for publications and presentations, and should receive as much care and attention as the rest of your paper and the data therein.

Authored by Abigail Williams, Trinity College, and presented at the 2013 Fall Research Conference, "Ethnic Concentration, Co-Ethnic Participation: Mexican-American Civic Participation and Destination Context" analyzes how immigrant civic participation varies with co-ethnic concentration for the largest immigrant ethnic group in the United States.

Thomas D. Cook will join Mathematica Policy Research as a senior fellow in September 2014. Cook is a nationally recognized expert in research methodology and program evaluation. He will be based in the company's Washington, D.C., office.

The NIDA US-Mexico Drug Abuse Prevention Research Fellowship provides a unique opportunity for Mexican researchers to obtain postdoctoral training with a NIDA-supported U.S. mentor. Prevention Research Fellows benefit from an intensive research training experience designed to enhance the fellows’ ability to conduct independent research upon return to Mexico. Applicants and their U.S. mentor may propose to conduct their research in any area of drug abuse prevention research.

Almost one out of five U.S. families live in housing with severe problems, such as overcrowding, insufficient cooking and bathing facilities or costs above 50% of family income, according to a new report measuring the nation's healthiest and least-healthy counties.

In this paper, published in the Winter 2014 JPAM, the authors identified the differential effect of legislation across higher versus lower education individuals. They found strong effects of mandatory seat belt laws for all education groups, with a stronger effect for those with fewer years of education. Additionally, the authors found that the differential effect by education is larger for mandatory seat belt laws with primary rather than secondary enforcement.

A Baltimore program that requires participants to use their government rental aid in low-poverty, mostly white suburbs sheds light on how government can implement housing vouchers more effectively. This also highlights an upcoming JPAM paper by Stefanie DeLuca and Jennifer Darrah.

For about 40 years now, since the beginning of the end of the era of the high-rise public housing project, government programs have been experimenting with a different idea to alleviate poverty: If we can’t easily change poor neighborhoods, let poor people move out of them instead. Give them vouchers to rent homes on the private market, theoretically outside of the ghetto. This article heavily references an upcoming JPAM paper by members DeLuca and Darrah.

The War on Poverty was launched by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In 2010, the official poverty rate was 15 percent, about as high as when the war was first declared. Many accounts, both historical and contemporary, tend to portray the War on Poverty as a costly experiment that planted doubts about the ability of public policy to address complex social problems.

Nestled at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountain, about 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, Claremont is a small, charming, eight-college town known as ‘The City of Trees and Ph.D.s.’ Ranked as the fifth-best place to live in the United States by CNN Money, Claremont provides a lovely environment for those looking to continue their education.

APPAM recognizes that the student membership represents the future of the organization and is very eager to get students more involved. If you attended the Fall Research Conference last year, you already know that APPAM made some great strides in this direction by hosting its first Pre-Doctoral Professional Development workshop, which provided current students with a valuable opportunity to learn about topics that will be important for our careers: the job market, publishing, and grant-writing.

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is inviting paper submissions for its upcoming issue on higher education. The theme for this issue is the effectiveness of American higher education, a theme intended to be broad enough to include a variety of possible topics bearing on the current performance and future prospects of U.S. higher education institutions. Deadline is April 30, 2014.

Teachers in the United States are compensated largely on the basis of fixed schedules that reward experience and credentials. However, there is a growing interest in whether performance-based incentives based on rigorous teacher evaluations can improve teacher retention and performance.

BlueJC currently uses BJOG journal club resources to host an online journal club on the last Wednesday of every month, with the discussion open for a week. So far, all discussions have been held on Twitter, tracked with #BlueJC.

China embarked on a national campaign of family planning in the 1970s after concerns regarding the carrying capacity of its national resources. By 1980, a policy that encouraged families to have only one child was in place along with contraceptive measures and penalties for noncompliance. Some aspects of these policies cut against the idea that reproductive choices should be made freely.

The study from Rice University and Duke University found that making a few changes to homework assignments in an upper-level undergraduate engineering course at Rice led to improved scores on exams. The study appears this week in the journal Educational Psychology Review.

"What you're seeing on Long Island is what you're seeing throughout the country -- the number of homeless families has grown much faster than the shelters and resources that are available to them," said Barbara Sheffield, policy adviser for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.

Homeowners in the U.S. last year received a total of roughly $70 billion in federal tax breaks through the deduction. But discussions in Congress about a broad tax overhaul are heating up, and all sorts of tax deductions—including the mortgage-interest deduction—are being discussed by both parties.

Among several competing explanations for observed environmental injustices in society, this paper focuses on the hypothesis regarding communities' potentials to engage in collective actions against the siting of unwanted facilities. By assuming that residents have a propensity to mount political opposition to the siting of and environmental disamenity, we build an agent-based model using assumptions of the Coase theorem. The simulation outcomes under the four decision scenarios were unexpected

In this paper by Sarah E. Anderson, Heather E. Hodges, and Terry L. Anderson, published in the Summer 2013 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the authors look at the trade-offs in modern bureaucracy between public and congressional input and agency expertise.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Fay Lomax Cook to serve as assistant director for the Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE). SBE's mission is to promote the understanding of people and their lives by supporting research that reveals basic facets of human behavior and helps provide answers to important societal questions and problems.

As Mayor Bill de Blasio prepares to greatly expand New York City’s preschool offerings, much debate has focused on how the expansion should be paid for, and less on what actually constitutes an effective prekindergarten program — one that will, as the mayor says, shrink the achievement gap between children of different racial and economic backgrounds. The mayor often says that studies have found that prekindergarten can have long-term benefits for children.

An interesting element of the Great Recession’s foreclosure crisis has been the increase in strategic default - when borrowers who can still make their monthly mortgage payments instead choose default and possible foreclosure. A popular explanation for this counterintuitive choice is that many homeowners whose mortgages are bigger than their home’s value simply “give up”.
[Cross-posted from Urban Institute's MetroTrends Blog with permission.]

This year, APPAM welcomes the first of two student representatives to the Association’s Policy Council. Sarah Cordes, a fourth-year doctoral student at the New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, was selected in December 2013 by Paul T. Decker, then-President of APPAM, and Michael Shires, Chair of the Committee of Institutional Representatives.

Written by Juliet Musso and Christopher Weare from the University of Southern California, this paper was presented at the 2013 Fall Research Conference session "Citizen Engagement Tools and Processes." It is this week's featured paper in APPAM's Online Paper Collection under the Public and Nonprofit Management and Finance policy category.

The federal government increasingly is looking for strategies to identify promising social programs for broad-scale rollout. Join Abt Associates and APPAM for a day-long Institutional Member Forum to explore social experiments in practice and how recent methodological advances can address real-world realities in the United States and abroad.

Who owns the term "social justice," conservatives or liberals? Whatever your own politics, you probably said "liberals." After all, most progressive policies — raising the minimum wage, expanding entitlements, increasing taxes on the wealthy as outlined in President Obama's budget proposal this week — are framed as steps towards greater fairness and compassion.

A recent study of the Impact of Early College by the American Institute for Research (AIR) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation demonstrated the consistently positive outcomes of Early College programs. The study by AIR stated confirmed that Early College high school programs have a positive impact on college enrollment and degree attainment. Further, the impact of an Early College high school on minority and first-generation of college-goers was even more substantial.

David S. Johnson, Chief of the U.S. Census Bureau's Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division, was elected this past January as the Association's new junior Vice President. He takes a few moments to share about his ideas and vision for APPAM.

Since 2002, the annual Cambio de Colores (Change of Colors) Conference has brought together researchers, practitioners, decision-makers, and community members to discuss the issues that Missouri, the Heartland, and other states face as a result of dramatic demographic changes. The U.S. Census clearly shows that large numbers of immigrants have been settling in rural and urban areas of many Heartland states.

In the Winter 2014 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, authors Jason A. Grissom, Susanna Loeb, and Nathaniel A. Nakashima examine the implementation and effects of a Miami school district's involuntary transfer policy for teachers. Despite claims that school districts need flexibility in teacher assignment to allocate teachers more equitably across schools and improve district performance, the power to involuntarily transfer teachers across schools remains hotly contested.

On March 19th 2014, the Roundtable will host a workshop entitled Principles and Best Practices for Sharing Data from Environmental Health Research. Environmental health experts agree that the question is not "if" research data should be shared, but "how." Transparency and accessibility of data derived from human subjects raise ethical, scientific, and process questions not necessarily salient in other areas of science, such as physics, geology, or chemistry.

"Waging War on Poverty: Historical Trends in Poverty Using the Supplemental Poverty Measure," by Liana Fox, Irv Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal, Jane Waldfogel, and Christopher Wimer, Columbia University, was presented at the 2013 Fall Research Conference during the session "Understanding the Effects of Social Policy on Poverty." It is a featured paper in APPAM's Online Paper Collection.

NYU Wagner has recently partnered with University College London to offer an innovative, one-year joint MPA/Executive Program in Global Public Policy Management. Applications are being accepted currently for the launch of the Program in September, 2014.

Currently, there are two mechanisms for increasing the wages of low-income Americans that have attracted attention in today’s political arena: the raising of the minimum wage to $10.10 and the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). This past Monday, AEI hosted a forum of experts who shared about the costs, benefits, and viability of these two primary solutions to assist low-income Americans.

A new AcademyHealth Translation and Dissemination Institute report offers a snapshot of the research and data gaps policymakers cite as critical to informing current Medicare policy, and offers practical advice for researchers seeking to more effectively communicate their findings.

Matthew Stagner directs the human services research in Mathematica’s Chicago office. He is a nationally known expert on youth development and risk behaviors, child welfare, evaluation design and methods and the role of research in policymaking. His work focuses on policies and programs for vulnerable youth, such as those transitioning out of foster care or into employment and postsecondary education.​

As part of the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA) administrative transition into the College of Human Ecology (CHE), annual tuition for students enrolled in the Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree program will shift in fall 2014 from a Tier 1 to Tier 2 level, as approved by the Board of Trustees at its January meeting. For the 2014-15 academic year, this will shift MPA tuition down from $47,050 to $30,785 annually.

In the years since Heinz’s founding, it has broken the traditional boundaries in the domain of the public interest to deeply explore the impact of information technology on organizations, markets and societies. As an institution, Heinz has persistently explored ways in which its educational programs can be more relevant and effective in their curriculum, in their delivery models, and in their degree of connection to external partners.

The preliminary schedule for the 2014 Spring Conference is now available and it is jam-packed with great sessions all day long. Featuring two plenaries, four roundtables, and six panels, this year's conference centers around teaching policy analysis and takes place at the University Club in downtown Washington, DC. Registration is open for the conference.

Nearly 40 percent of unwed parents with low education levels share childrearing responsibilities with a co-residential boyfriend or girlfriend, according to a 2013 report from the United States Census Bureau. Oftentimes these couples share at least one biological child, but in 27 percent of relationships, either mom or dad is stepping in to raise children they didn’t conceive.

In 2009, approximately 1.3 million Medicaid enrollees with disabilities and chronic conditions received Medicaid-financed long-term care services and supports (LTSS) in institutional settings. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has been promoting efforts to reduce dependence on institutional care and expand access to home- and community-based services (HCBS).

Between 12 and 30 percent of school-aged children reportedly skip breakfast on a given weekday. To mitigate any impacts on health and academic performance, many schools implement universally free breakfast programs for students.

New analysis from CLASP shows state spending on child care assistance, including funds from two federal programs—the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant—at a 10-year low and the number of children receiving CCDBG-funded assistance at a 14-year low. About 263,000 fewer children received child care assistance through CCDBG in 2012 than in 2006, according to newly released data from HHS.

If you want to live in a more equal community, it might mean living in a more moribund economy. That is one of the implications of a new study of local income trends by the Brookings Institution, the Washington research group. It found that inequality is sharply higher in economically vibrant cities like New York and San Francisco than in less dynamic ones like Columbus, Ohio, and Wichita, Kansas.​

Access to the nation’s most selective colleges remains starkly unequal, with students in the lowest income quartile constituting less than 4% of enrollment. A popular explanation for this phenomenon is that low-income students undermatch by attending less selective colleges when their credentials predict admission to more highly selective colleges.

At last year's Fall Research Conference, Jane Waldfogel was introduced as the Association's new President-elect for 2014. Waldfogel is a professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University School of Social Work and a visiting professor at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics. She is currently overseeing the planning and development of the 2014 Fall Research Conference, taking place November 6-8 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), one of the nation’s most effective voices in championing access and success for all students in postsecondary education, announced today its new policy priorities, which are grounded in the organization’s rich history of leadership and service and are responsive to the needs of today’s students.

The Policy Studies Organization is inviting all APPAM members to attend the annual Middle East Dialogue 2014, held in Washington, DC on February 27. This year's forum focuses on Strategies for Change in the Middle East. The registration fee will be waived for active APPAM members.

Increasing the minimum wage would have two principal effects on low-wage workers. Most of them would receive higher pay that would increase their family’s income, and some of those families would see their income rise above the federal poverty threshold. But some jobs for low-wage workers would probably be eliminated, the income of most workers who became jobless would fall substantially, and the share of low-wage workers who were employed would probably fall slightly.

Difficulties in paying for college and in maintaining good academic performance are two major hurdles to college graduation for low-income students. In recent years, state and federal budgets for postsecondary education have been cut significantly, limiting the options policymakers, education leaders, and communities have to improve rates of college attendance and graduation.

Widespread skepticism of and public opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), even among those likely to benefit from the new law, has been reported since the law was passed in 2010. In December 2013, for example, a New York Times/CBS News poll reported that uninsured people were confused about the law and worried that it would increase their health care costs. As a consequence, 6 in 10 said they had not looked into coverage and subsidy options in their state Marketplace.

According to the findings of a recent study, two academically similar groups of 12th graders ended up earning virtually the same amount of money even though one group had passed their high school exit exams and the other group had failed to earn diplomas after missing the exam cutoff rate by a hair.

Since the publication of Robert K. Merton’s theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect), several empirical studies have tried to measure its presence at the level of papers, individual researchers, institutions or countries. This research shows that the journal in which papers are published have a strong influence on citation rates, as duplicate papers published in high impact journals obtain twice as much citations as identical counterparts published in lower impact journals.

A new batch of No Child Left Behind Act waiver monitoring reports shows that Oregon and Arkansas are among the many states that continue to stumble as they try to turn around their lowest-performing schools. However, if the U.S. Department of Education were giving waiver implementation grades, it seems that so far, Minnesota has gotten the only "A."

Health coverage stakeholders and policymakers alike have asked whether CHIP is still important in the post-ACA coverage world. This paper highlights CHIP’s role in reducing the numbers of uninsured children in America and discusses how CHIP fits into the reformed ACA health care system.

With support from AARP, a conference on Social Insurance and Lifecycle Events Among Older Americans will be held on December 5th of 2014 in Washington, DC. The conference will focus specifically on lifecycle events commonly encountered by older Americans, the responsiveness of current policies to those events, and new thinking about policies consistent with a changing political environment.

This paper aims to find effective policy options that can support the development of more attractive jobs in Egypt’s private sector and lead to job creation and inclusive growth. Egypt is facing a marked “youth bulge” and therefore has a high rate of youth unemployment, particularly among the highly educated.

The idea seemed transformative. The Affordable Care Act would fund a new research outfit evocatively named the Innovation Center to discover how to most effectively deliver health care, with $10 billion to spend over a decade. But now that the center has gotten started, many researchers and economists are disturbed that it is not using randomized clinical trials, the rigorous method that is widely considered the gold standard in medical and social science research.

In 2012, the Department of Defense (DoD) spent $52 billion on health care for service members, retirees, and their families. The department offers health care to nearly 10 million people through its TRICARE program, an integrated system of military health care providers and regional networks of civilian providers. Established in 1993, TRICARE now consists of three major plans: TRICARE Prime, TRICARE Standard, and TRICARE Extra.

The GED is a common pathway for many students to transition into postsecondary education and ultimately, the workforce. Past studies have indicated that in practice, many GED prep programs fall short of this goal. For the GED to live up to its potential as a viable alternative for youth to use to progress to and through postsecondary education, GED programs must re-evaluate the supports and services provided to students.

In a first, working-age people now make up the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps — a switch from a few years ago, when children and the elderly were the main recipients.
Some of the change is due to demographics, such as the trend toward having fewer children. But a slow economic recovery with high unemployment, stagnant wages and an increasing gulf between low-wage and high-skill jobs also plays a big role.

A new report out of the Rockefeller Institute of Government paints the darkest picture of issues surrounding public-employee pensions I have ever read. But unlike so many reports brimming with dire warnings about pensions, Strengthening the Security of Public Sector Defined Benefit Plans isn't anti-government-employee or anti-union and, as its title suggests, it isn't yet another call for converting all defined benefit plans to defined contribution.

In November 2013, Invitation Homes LP, the Blackstone subsidiary that is the largest of the REO-to-rental operations, completed the first securitized financing of REO-to-rental properties (Invitation Homes 2013-SFR1). The private placement was very well received by the market, producing more favorable terms than many had anticipated. In this short article, we walk through why the deal was done, how it was structured, and what the financing means for the market.

Lack of researcher consensus on how to measure disadvantaged students' access to effective teaching has made it challenging for practitioners to draw lessons from the data. This brief aims to help policymakers understand the emerging evidence by synthesizing findings from three peer-reviewed studies that collectively span 17 states.

This study provides an in-depth, systematic look at program implementation, operations, outputs, and outcomes in four diverse Tribal TANF programs, and identifies promising practices and areas for further study. Overall, the study found that tribes use the flexibility of Tribal TANF to create diverse programs that reflect their unique circumstances, opportunities, and cultures.

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) has completed its member elections for the next cohort to serve on APPAM’s Policy Council. In addition to the election of a practitioner and two academic representatives, APPAM members also elected a new Vice President and Secretary of the organization’s Executive Committee. For the first time in the Association’s history, a student was appointed to serve as a member of the Policy Council.

APPAM’s annual Fall Research Conference, a multi-disciplinary annual event that attracts the highest quality of research across a wide variety of important current and emerging policy and management issues, will be held November 6 – 8 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Association is pleased to announce that the submission period for session proposals is now open through April 18. This year’s conference will be under the direction of President-elect Jane Waldfogel, Columbia University.

A new, highly critical report concludes that the Obama administration has not paid adequate attention to the needs of English-language learners, the fastest growing group of students in the nation's public schools. Published by the BUENO National Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the report paints a picture of a U.S. Department of Education that has been indifferent to the unique educational needs of English-learners.

Fifty years ago Wednesday, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered what may have been the last genuinely uplifting State of the Union speech we've had. "This administration, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America," he said. "We shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on Earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it."

A key shift within the constantly changing landscape of American education is one of more choice by parents in choosing where their children are educated with public funds. Some school districts offer widely available choices through public charter schools, vouchers, magnet schools, virtual schools, and open-enrollment in regular public schools. Other districts remain committed to the more traditional model of zoned schools, where nearly all students are assigned based on residence.

Nearly 39 million adults in the United States do not have a high school diploma. Roughly two-thirds of them eventually obtain a high school equivalency credential like the General Educational Development (GED) certificate, with the hope of then obtaining a job. But in today’s changing economy, possessing a GED certificate ― while helpful for finding employment ― often isn’t enough, and many GED recipients will continue to struggle in the labor market.

Experts with the American Institutes for Research (AIR), in collaboration with Mathematica Policy Research, wrote and conducted the analysis for “Operational Authority, Support, and Monitoring of School Turnaround,” a research brief examining low performing schools that receive federal School Improvement Grants. The study looks at school operational authority, state and district support for the turnaround effort, and state monitoring of school turnaround progress.

APPAM has selected Kenneth Couch, Professor at the University of Connecticut, as the next Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM). The University of Connecticut will be the institution of record for the Journal during Couch’s five-year term, which will begin in July. JPAM is the leading journal in the field of public policy and public management.

To many Americans, the war on poverty declared 50 years ago by President Lyndon B. Johnson has largely failed. The poverty rate has fallen only to 15 percent from 19 percent in two generations, and 46 million Americans live in households where the government considers their income scarcely adequate.​

The University of Kansas is pleased to announce two new competitive fellowships for Ph.D. students. Those selected for these fellowships will be granted generous research and teaching assistantships that cover all tuition and fees, as well as a competitive monthly stipend. Subject to adequate progress toward degree completion, these awards will be renewed for up to four years of study. Deadline is January 25.

The effects of immigration reform proposals will extend well beyond the 11 million unauthorized U.S. residents. Those unauthorized immigrants share their homes with 8.7 million people who legally reside in the United States. Three quarters of those legal residents are U.S. born citizens and 60 percent are children.

In coming decades, the aging of the population, rising health care costs, and the expansion of federal subsidies for health insurance will put increasing pressure on the federal budget. At the same time, by 2020, if current laws generally remained in place, federal spending apart from that for Social Security and major health care programs would drop to its smallest percentage of total output in more than 70 years, and federal revenues would be a larger percentage of output than they have been.

Much of the more than $1 billion a year in federal taxpayer-funded work-study money is going to the children of better-off families at expensive private universities, and not their lower-income counterparts, under a 50-year-old formula those pricey universities are unlikely to willingly relinquish.